What America Can Learn From Ontario's Education Success

By Michael Fullan

In the last decade, the Canadian province dramatically improved its education system to become one of the best in the world. Its innovative strategy can provide a blueprint for U.S. reform.

In 2006, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty plays a game of hopscotch with elementary school students in Toronto /Reuters

Ontario is Canada's largest province, home to over 13 million people
and a public education system with roughly 2 million students, 120,000 educators,
and 5,000 schools. As recently as 2002, this system was stagnant by virtually
any measure of performance. In October 2003, a new provincial government (Canada
has no federal agency or jurisdiction in education) was elected with a mandate
and commitment to transform it.

Improvements began within a year, and now some eight years later its
900 high schools have shown an increase in graduation rates from 68 percent (2003-04)
to 82 percent (2010-11), while reading, writing, and math results have gone up
15 percentage points across its 4,000 elementary schools since 2003. Morale of
teachers and principals is stronger (fewer teachers leave the profession in the
first few years), and achievement gaps have been substantially reduced for low-income
students, the children of recent immigrants, and special education students
(although not for "First Nation" students). In short, the entire system has
dramatically improved.

These accomplishments have not gone unnoticed outside Canada. The
McKinsey group, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in
Paris, the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, D.C., and
Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance have all done recent case
studies on Ontario's education system, concluding that it is one of the most
improved and highest performing in the world. They especially admire
the impressive, innovative strategy that got the results. So, what's the
secret?

In practice, this meant refocusing the way Ontario schools delivered
education. Like many school systems, Ontario had too many "top" priorities. The
Ministry of Education selected three--literacy, math, and high school
graduation--with a commitment to raise the bar for all students and close achievement
gaps between all groups. There are other goals, of course, but these three are non-negotiable
and take precedence because they leverage so many other learning goals.

Focus and persistence ensure that these priorities are not going to be
discarded along the way. The history of education innovations has generated a "this
too shall pass" mindset among teachers. One of our colleagues calls this
phenomenon "the law of innovation fatigue." Any attempt to create a high-leverage
priority (like the three adopted by Ontario) requires that the education system
as a whole commits to them long-term.

But priorities don't mean anything if you don't develop the
relationships necessary to enact them. The provincial government set out to
develop a strong sense of two-way partnerships and collaboration, especially
between administrators and teachers, and in concert with teachers' unions. This
required providing significant leeway to individual school districts to
experiment with novel approaches to reaching the province's three main
educational goals, and focusing significant reform efforts on investments in
staffing and teacher development.

By focusing on teacher development, Ontario was also able to raise
teacher accountability. Decades of experience have taught Canadian educators
that you can't get greater accountability through direct measures of rewards
and punishments. Instead, what Ontario did was to establish transparency of results and practice
(anyone can find out what any school's results are, and what they are doing to
get those results) while combining this with what we call non-judgmentalism. This latter policy means that if a teacher is
struggling, administrators and peers will step in to help her get better.
(There are, however, steps that can be taken if a situation consistently fails
to improve.)

The final element of the strategy involves identifying and spreading
quality practices. Most education systems are loosely coupled to say the
least -- behind the classroom door, teachers are islands unto themselves. In such
isolated systems, two problems emerge. The first is that good ideas do not get
around; they remain trapped in individual classrooms or schools. The other
problem is that poor teaching can remain entrenched, because good practices are
not being disseminated. A big part of the Ontario strategy has been to break
down the walls of the classroom, the school, and even the district by
increasing communication, cataloging and sharing best practices, and fostering
a culture of teamwork. To that end, the Ministry of Education guides local
school districts in developing more collaborative professional environments, while
also acting as a clearinghouse for innovation and best practices.

The net result of these five forces is an education system that has the
characteristics of a high-performing organization: relentless focus,
interactive pressure and support, a preoccupation with results and how to
improve them, a culture of mutual commitment, and what we call collaborative
competition, where there is no limit to what is being attempted. The fact that
this strategy develops leaders at all levels -- leaders who focus on results, as
they help develop other leaders -- means that sustainability is built into the
whole enterprise. Ontario isn't perfect. But it proves that large-scale reform
can be accomplished in school systems in fairly short periods of time.